In this series I will examine this question. First I will sketch an argument against feticide: the killing of a fetus. Then I will examine three common ways of criticising this argument and respond to them.

The Argument Against Feticide

Implicit, if not overtly explicit, in much historic Christian moral reflection on feticide is a simple three-premise position. Firstly, that there is a divine law prohibiting homicide – the killing of a human being without adequate justification; secondly, a fetus is a human being; and thirdly, that in all or most cases of feticide, justification for homicide is not forthcoming. This argument can be summarised as follows:

[1] It is wrong to kill a human being without justification;

[2] A fetus is a human being;

[3] In the case of feticide (at least in the majority of cases) insufficient or no justification is forthcoming.

This argument is formally valid. These three premises jointly entail that feticide is wrong; premises [1] and [2] entail that it is wrong to kill a fetus without justification, this conclusion, conjoined with [3], entails that feticide is wrong in at least the majority of cases. Given the argument is formally valid, any critique of this argument must call into question the truth of either of the premises. [For more on validity see Assessing Arguments]

Avoidance Tactics
Notwithstanding this, the most common response to this argument is some tactic seeking avoidance of the issue. It is not unusual to see attempts to denounce, insult, caricature or defame the character of those who oppose feticide. If current commentary is to be believed opposition to legal abortion comes from misogynist fundamentalist fanatics who want to impose their religious mores onto others.

Of course, these strings of pejorative terms fail to address the argument above. Suppose everything that is said of such people is true – people who oppose feticide do have the bad character traits or motives claimed – the soundness of the argument remains untouched. A good argument does not cease to be a good argument just because someone has personal flaws or dubious motives. It is only unsound if it is invalid or if one of its premises is false. A person’s motives for adopting a conclusion or the circumstances of their supporting that conclusion, might tell us something of the psychology of that person but it does not tell us about the truth or falsity of their premises or the validity of their argument.

Similar things can be said about slogans such as “you can’t force your morality onto others”, “you can’t legislate morality”. As I argued in Imposing Your Beliefs Onto Others: A Defence, those who cite such slogans face a dilemma; either they claim that the slogan “you can’t force your morality onto others” applies to the moral principles prohibiting homicide or they do not. If they do not, then opposing feticide can only involve an unjust imposition of morality onto another if you first assume feticide is not homicide. If they do then their position is manifestly absurd as it entails that all forms of homicide – murder, manslaughter, infanticide, etc – should be decriminalised.

Is Feticide Justified?
In the literature on the morality of feticide numerous arguments have been offered against premise [3] that purport to establish that feticide is justified. These arguments can be broadly grouped into two categories. The first comprises of appeals to various beneficial consequences that the practice is alleged to have. The second category of arguments is rights-based and appeals to an alleged right to control or dispose of one’s body as one sees fit.

What is important to note is that the typical arguments against [3] succeed only if it is assumed from the outset the falsity of [2], the fetus is not a human being and given this that feticide is not a form of homicide. Some examples will illustrate this.

Rights Arguments
It is frequently asserted that “that a woman ought to be in control of what happens to her body to the greatest extent possible, that she ought to use her body in ways she wants to and refrain from using it in ways she does not want to.”[1] This assertion is false. Women do not have a right to do whatever they like with their bodies – no one has such a right!

Women cannot use their bodies to rape or commit homicide or set fires or steal. The right to do as we please is limited by the morality of our actions, thus whether abortion falls into the category of an action we are free to choose to do depends on whether feticide is homicide. If it is, then this argument fails but as currently used it is just assumed that it is not.

Some might object that such an interpretation is an uncharitable reading of this contention. What is important from this perspective is that all people have a right to control what happens inside or to their own bodies. I have a right to control what happens to mine and you have a right to control what happens to yours. Hence, provided the decision I make does not involve me using your body in a way that you do not consent to then I have a right to do it. However, implicit in this argument is the claim that a fetus, at least until born, is part of a woman’s body, that it is not a separate, bodily-living, human being on its own.

This claim is erroneous. There are no reasons for affirming this. The usual reason given is because the fetus exists inside a woman’s body and is dependent upon her for survival so therefore the fetus is part of that woman.

Despite its constant repetition in the literature, this reason is wanting. If a person lives inside an ocean liner for several months while on a cruise ship in the Atlantic, she resides inside the cruise liner and depends upon its facilities for survival. It does not follow that she is part of the cruise liner!

Numerous other counter-examples are available against this line of reasoning. A premature infant is not part of the incubator nor is an embryo, brought into existence extra-corporeally, part of a petri-dish.

Not only are there no reasons for thinking that a fetus is part of its mother’s body, there are some good reasons for thinking this contention false.  To suggest that a fetus is part of a woman’s body entails that the mother of a male fetus has two heads, four arms and a penis.[2] Once again, this argument is successful only if one assumes a fetus is not a human being from the outset. If the fetus is human then it too has a right to not have its body harmed.

Back-Street Abortion
The infamous illegal “back-street” abortion argument fares no better. I have written more about this in my post on Back-Street Abortion but consider the following argument from Zoe During;

But the majority of women, poor women, have had to go to backstreet practitioners or swallow dubious potions or use knitting needles on themselves. Attempting illegal abortion by such means has always been dreadful and dangerous and greatly increased maternal mortality.

The World Health Organisation estimates that worldwide there are 20 million abortions each year, half or more being illegal, these causing up to 78,000 maternal deaths and hundreds of thousands of disabilities… Thus not having access to legal abortion unjustifiably kills mothers and babies, while legalising abortion saves lives.[3]

The allegation that thousands of women die from illegal abortions can justify legalisation only if feticide is not homicide. If it is homicide then this argument reduces to the bizarre assertion that we should kill over ten million children each year in order to prevent thousands of women from harming themselves by breaking the law.

Other Consequentialist Arguments
Typical consequentialist arguments also fail. We are told that abortion prevents unwanted children who are likely to be poor, abused or engage in crime. It is hailed as a solution to over-population and the existence of more handicapped people. It prevents adult and teenage women from falling into economic hardship and stress. It enables them to complete their education, pursue their careers.  However, all this is equally true of infanticide.

Infanticide prevents the existence of unwanted children and their associated social costs, lowers the population, prevents the handicapped existing and saves women and teenagers from the economic and emotional stresses of parenthood. Yet infanticide, as convenient as it is, is condemned because it is homicide.

Again, all these arguments assume that the fetus is not human without actually arguing for it.

Self-Defence
This is not to say that feticide can never be unjustified. Utilising the justification of self-defence, I think a case can be made for feticide where pregnancy constitutes a serious threat of harm to a woman’s life. We do not generally think that a woman who stabs and kills her rapist has committed an unjustifiable homicide. So where a fetus poses a threat on par with such cases, defensive force aimed at it might be able to to be justified. However, such cases are extremely rare and make up less than 0.5% of all abortions (according to figures compiled by the New Zealand Abortion Supervisory Committee and this seems similar to figures from other jurisdictions).

So if feticide is homicide then the vast majority of abortions lack justification. To defend permissive abortion laws by appealing to the tiny amount of hard cases is a bit like allowing people to commit homicide whenever it suits them on the grounds that there exist rare cases of justifiable homicide in self-defence.

Unless on contests [2] the claim that a fetus is a human being then in the vast majority of cases feticide appears to be unjustified homicide.

In my next post Abortion and the Morality of Feticide: Part II I will look at whether the fetus is human and the arguments that it is not.

[1] Baruch Brody “Opposition to Abortion: A Human Rights Approach” In John Arthur ed Morality and Moral Controversy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc, 1981) 181.
[2] Peter Kreeft The Unaborted Socrates (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1983) 45-47; Francis J Beckwith Politically Correct Death: Answering the Arguments for Abortion Rights (Grand Rapids MI: Baker Books, 1993) 124.
[3] Zoe During “Is Abortion Justifiable?” New Zealand Rationalist Humanist Spring (1999) 10-11.

The debate will be held at the University of Auckland on Monday 2 August from 7-9pm in “The Centennial” 260 – 098 OGGB (the bottom level of the Business School) on 12 Grafton Rd, Auckland City.

If you enjoyed the 2008 debate at Auckland University between William Lane Craig and Bill Cooke, you should enjoy this debate.

Bradley is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy with areas of specialty in Philosophical Logic, Metaphysics, Logical Atomism; he has previously debated William Lane Craig, Edward Blaiklock and many other Christian scholars and describes himself as an older generation “new atheist”.

Flannagan is an Auckland based Philosopher and Theologian with areas of specialty in Philosophy of Religion, Ethics and Theology; he has previously debated Bill Cooke, Zoe During and, of course, writes for this blog.

The format of the debate will be as follows:

Dr Bradley: Opening Comments [20 min]
Dr Flannagan: Opening Comments [20 min]
Dr Bradley: Reply to Dr Flannagan [10 min]
Dr Flannagan: Reply to Dr Bradley[10 min]
Dr Bradley: Closing Comments [7 min]
Dr Flannagan: Closing Comments [7 min]
Questions from the floor: [30 min]

The moderator for the debate will be John Bishop.

Bradley will be introduced by Robert Nola.

Flannagan will be introduced by Chris Tucker.

Both Bradley and Flannagan are experienced and engaging public speakers who are practiced at pitching their topics to suit their audiences. So, invite all your friends, and block out the evening of Monday 2 August from 7-9 pm now and make sure you get to the debate early to locate parking and grab a good seat.

This debate is brought to you by the Evangelical Union and the Reason and Science Society as part of the University of Auckland’s Jesus week/Atheist week, with support from Thinking Matters.

The event will be videoed and will be published on this blog. Entry is free and any and all are welcome.

There is even a Facebook page you can rsvp on and use to invite your friends.

No one denies that if abortion is not made legal, safe, and accessible in our society, women will seek out illegal and life-threatening abortions to terminate pregnancies they cannot accept. Antiabortion activists appear willing to accept this cost, although liberals definitely are not; feminists, who explicitly value women, judge the inevitable loss of women’s lives that results from restrictive abortion laws to be of fundamental concern.[2]

In similar vein Dr Zoe During, former President of the Abortion Law Reform Association of New Zealand (ALRANZ), in a debate with the me, gave a paper entitled “Is Abortion Justifiable: An Examination of the Evidence”, in which she argued,

But the majority of women, poor women, have had to go to backstreet practitioners or swallow dubious potions or use knitting needles on themselves. Attempting illegal abortion by such means has always been dreadful and dangerous and greatly increased maternal mortality.

The World Health Organisation estimates that worldwide there are 20 million abortions each year, half or more being illegal, these causing up to 78,000 maternal deaths and hundreds of thousands of disabilities. A New York statistic is illuminating. For the three years before abortion became legal in that state, the maternal death ratio averaged 51 per 100,000 live births. For each of the three years immediately following legalisation it dropped to a mere 38, and there was the additional bonus of a 5% reduction in the neo-natal mortality rate. Thus not having access to legal abortion unjustifiably kills mothers and babies, while legalising abortion saves lives.[3]

During’s argument rests upon three contentions:

(a) That prohibiting feticide results in the death of women.
(b) That (a) entails that prohibiting feticide kills women.
(c) That killing of thousands of women in these circumstances is unjustifiable.

Firstly, this is an argument not to the conclusion that feticide is permissible but rather that it should not be a criminal action. The fact (if it is a fact) that there are reasons why an act should not be a criminal offence does not entail that the act is morally permissible. Strictly speaking, this argument is compatible with the position that feticide is morally wrong. However, even as an argument for decriminalisation it is unsound.

Many debates swirl around (a). As the citation shows During bases her conclusion on statistics from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and an un-referenced study about mortality in New York. These statistical claims are vigorously debated in the literature,[4] however, for our purposes this debate can be set aside. More interesting, I think, are the normative premises encapsulated in (b) and (c). If these are mistaken, the argument as a whole is unjust regardless of any merits of (a).

Regarding premise (b) During appears to think that if passing a law results in the death of large numbers of women then to pass such a law is to kill these women. This is false. It is an empirical fact that building motorways results in innocent people dying, yet it does not follow that a person who builds a road kills innocent people. It is also a fact that by allowing people to swim at beaches some people will drown yet in permitting people to swim at beaches the government cannot be said to have drowned these people. Even if it could be demonstrated that restricting feticide results in women dying it does not follow that such restrictions kill women.

During fails to distinguish between an action that foreseeably results in a person’s death and an action that causes that person’s death. Suppose that Parliament were to criminalise feticide and this led to a chain of events one of which was the death of a woman due to septic abortion. Somewhere in this chain, between the act of the legislature and the death of the woman, are the free actions of various people who choose to ignore or breach these laws. Parliament does not perform these actions; in fact they are done in defiance of Parliament’s will and hence without Parliament’s consent. Such actions include the choice of a woman to violate the law and procure an abortion and the choice of an abortionist to perform an abortion and to violate hygiene and safety standards. The death and injury that occurs is caused by these actions. It is the abortionist’s decision, acting as an agent of the woman, to perform unsafe surgery that causes the injury to occur. These facts make it evident that Parliament does not cause such deaths. The actions of the woman and abortionist are un-coerced. They are free, voluntary actions and as such not caused by someone else. It follows immediately that they were not caused by the state. If they were not caused by the state, then the effects that follow from them were not caused by the state either. The suggestion that one causes the free (and hence uncaused) reactions of others to decisions one makes is far fetched.

The failure to distinguish caused and foreseen effects is illustrated well by Augustine. In contending with the consequentialists of his day, Augustine proposed the following example. Suppose a man approaches a woman and tells her that he will kill himself if she refuses to have sex with him. Does that mean that she is a murderer if she refuses?[5]

One response to this kind of rejoinder is to claim that a woman’s choice is not free; rather it is made out of desperation and anguish. She feels compelled to abort given the psychological and economic pressures she faces. Three responses can be given to this argument.

Firstly, even if it is granted, the same cannot be said to be true of the abortionist and given that it is the abortionist’s actions that kill the woman, the fact that these are uncaused entails that Parliament cannot have caused them either.

Secondly, even if the woman’s actions were not free but caused in some way it does not follow that Parliament caused them. In some circumstances other people, such as the man’s decision to have intercourse and then to not support her or the family’s refusal to help, caused this desperation. Given that these actions are free, then Parliament cannot be held to have caused these either.

Thirdly, making the claim that a woman was not free to refuse an abortion makes this argument less plausible. Abortion is often trumpeted as a woman’s free choice. If this claim is correct then how can women be coerced into such an operation against their consent? Further, it seems odd to claim that we should legalise forced abortions.

Turning to (c), this claim is plausible only if it is true that feticide is not homicide. If feticide is homicide then to permit feticide is to permit homicide. Not only will the failure to permit feticide result in human beings dying, permitting it will also result in human beings being killed. If, as During contends, endorsing a rule that results in deaths is wrong then it will also be wrong to permit feticide.

It is worthwhile noting that the numbers of fetuses killed by legal abortion is significantly higher than the number of women killed by illegal ones. At its highest, the number of women who died from illegal abortion in New Zealand in any one year was 37.[6] The number of fetuses destroyed by legal abortion in New Zealand annually is approximately 18,000.[7] Moreover, according to the stats During cited from WHO, there are around 10 million legal abortions per year and 78,000 deaths resulting from illegal ones.[8] If we follow the argument During offers, then we are permitting the killing of 10,000,000 human beings per year to avoid killing 78,000 human beings.

During’s argument in favour of feticide is sound only if feticide is not homicide. However, if feticide is homicide she is arguing that in order to prevent thousands of people from harming themselves we should kill millions of people; a claim that on the face of it is absurd.

This absurdity is not unique to During; the same thing can be said about the arguments offered by Sherwin and Hutchinson.

[1] Susan Sherwin “Abortion a Feminist Perspective” in Ethical Issues in Modern Medicine ed Bonnie Steinbock & John D. Arras (Mountain View CA: Mayfield Publishing Co, 1999) 361.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Zoe During “Is Abortion Justifiable?” New Zealand Rationalist Humanist Spring (1999) 10-11.
[4] The debates on this issue are documented in Francis Beckwith Politically Correct Death: Answering the Arguments for Abortion Rights (Grand Rapids MI: Baker Books, 1993) 54-59.
[5] Augustine On Lying 9.
[6] Wayne Facer Criminal Abortion in New Zealand: Public Health Consequences; this study was distributed by the Abortion Law Reform Association of New Zealand in the 1970’s. Facer was an outspoken proponent of decriminalising abortion.
[7] New Zealand Abortion Supervisory Committee Report 2008.
[8] These figures are not current.

RELATED POSTS:
Is Abortion Liberal? Part 1
Is Abortion Liberal? Part 2
Sentience Part 1
Sentience Part 2
Viability
Abortion and Child Abuse
Abortion and Brain Death: A Response to Farrar
Abortion and Capital Punishment: No Contradiction
Imposing Your Beliefs onto Others: A Defence
Boonin’s Defense of the Sentience Criterion: A Critique Part I
Boonin’s Defense of the Sentience Criterion: A Critique Part II